Structural Marxism

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Structural Marxism was an approach to Marxist philosophy based on structuralism, primarily

associated with the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser and his students. It was
influential in France during the 1960s and 1970s, and also came to influence philosophers,
political theorists and sociologists outside of France during the 1970s. Other proponents of
structural Marxism were the sociologist Nicos Poulantzas and the anthropologist Maurice
Godelier. Many of Althusser's students broke with structural Marxism in the late 1960s and
1970s.
Toward the middle of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Marxist theorists began to develop
structuralist Marxist accounts of the state, law, and crime. Structuralist Marxism disputes the
instrumentalist view that the state can be viewed as the direct servant of the capitalist or ruling
class. Whereas the instrumentalist position argues that the institutions of the state are under the
direct control of those members of the capitalist class in positions of state power, the structuralist
perspective takes the position that the institutions of the state must function in such a way as to
ensure ongoing viability of capitalism more generally. Another way that Marxists put this is that
the institutions of the state must function so as to reproduce capitalist society as a whole.
Structuralists view the state in a capitalist mode of production as taking a specifically capitalist
form, not because particular individuals are in powerful positions, but because the state
reproduces the logic of capitalist structure in its economic, legal, and political institutions. We
might say that a structuralist perspective would argue that the institutions of the state (including
its legal institutions) function in the long-term interests of capital and capitalism, rather than in
the short term interests of members of the capitalist class. Structuralists would thus argue that the
state and its institutions have a certain degree of independence from specific elites in the ruling
or capitalist class.
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Structuralism
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For the use of structuralism in biology, see Structuralism (biology). For structuralism
in architecture, see Structuralism (architecture). For structuralism in philosophy of
science, see Structuralism (philosophy of science).

Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field (for
instance, mythology) as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the
work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). But many French intellectuals perceived it to have
a wider application, and the model was soon modified and applied to other fields, such as
anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory and architecture. This ushered in the dawn of
structuralism as not just a method, but also an intellectual movement that came to take
existentialism's pedestal in 1960s France.[1]
In the 1970s, it came under internal fire from critics who accused it of being too rigid and
ahistorical. However, many of structuralism's theorists, from Michel Foucault to Jacques Lacan,
continue to assert an influence on continental philosophy, and many of the fundamental
assumptions of its critics, that is, of adherents of poststructuralism, are but a continuation of
structuralism.[1]
Structuralism isn't only applied within literary theory. There are also structuralist theories that
exist within philosophy of science, anthropology and in sociology. According to Alison Assiter,
there are four common ideas regarding structuralism that form an 'intellectual trend'. Firstly, the
structure is what determines the position of each element of a whole. Secondly, structuralists
believe that every system has a structure. Thirdly, structuralists are interested in 'structural' laws
that deal with coexistence rather than changes. And finally structures are the 'real things' that lie
beneath the surface or the appearance of meaning.[2]

Contents
[hide]
• 1 History
• 2 Structuralism in linguistics
• 3 Structuralism in anthropology and sociology
• 4 Structuralism in literary theory and literary
criticism
• 5 Structuralism after World War II
• 6 Reactions to structuralism
 • 7 Notes
• 8 See also

[edit] History
Structuralism appeared in academia in the second half of the 20th century, and grew to become
one of the most popular approaches in academic fields concerned with the analysis of language,
culture, and society. The work of Ferdinand de Saussure concerning linguistics is generally
considered to be a starting point of structuralism. The term "structuralism" itself appeared in the
works of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and gave rise, in France, to the
"structuralist movement," which spurred the work of such thinkers as Louis Althusser, the
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, as well as the structural Marxism of Nicos Poulantzas. Almost all
members of this so-called movement denied that they were part of it[citation needed]. Structuralism is
closely related to semiotics. Post-structuralism attempted to distinguish itself from the simple use
of the structural method. Deconstruction was an attempt to break with structuralistic thought.
Some intellectuals like Julia Kristeva, for example, took structuralism (and Russian formalism)
for a starting point to later become prominent post-structuralists. Structuralism has had varying
degrees of influence in the social sciences: a great deal in the field of sociology.

[edit] Structuralism in linguistics

See also: Structural linguistics

Structuralism states that human culture is to be understood as a system of signs. Robert Scholes
defined structuralism as a reaction to modernist alienation and despair. Structuralists attempted
to develop a semiology (system of signs). Ferdinand de Saussure was the originator of the 20th
century structuralism, and evidence of this can be found in Course in General Linguistics,
written by Saussure's colleagues after his death and based on student notes, where he focused not
on the use of language (parole, or speech), but rather on the underlying system of language
(langue) and called his theory semiology. However, the discovery of the underlying system had
to be done via examination of the parole (speech). As such, Structural Linguistics are actually an
early form of corpus linguistics (quantification). This approach focused on examining how the
elements of language related to each other in the present, that is, 'synchronically' rather than
'diachronically'. Finally, he argued that linguistic signs were composed of two parts, a signifier
(the sound pattern of a word, either in mental projection — as when we silently recite lines from
a poem to ourselves — or in actual, physical realization as part of a speech act) and a signified
(the concept or meaning of the word). This was quite different from previous approaches which
focused on the relationship between words and things in the world that they designate (Roy
Harris and Talbot Taylor, Landmarks in Linguistic Thought, 1st ed. [1989], pp. 178-179).
Key notions in structural linguistics are the notions of paradigm, syntagm and value, though
these notions were not yet fully developed in Saussure's thought. A structural paradigm is
actually a class of linguistic units (lexemes, morphemes or even constructions) which are
possible in a certain position in a given linguistic environment (like a given sentence), which is
the syntagm. The different functional role of each of these members of the paradigm is called
value (valeur in French). Structuralist criticism relates the literary text to a larger overarching
structure which may be a particular genre, a range of intertextual connections, a model of a
universal narrative structure or a notion of the narrative being a system of recurrent patterns or
motifs. [3]
Saussure's Course influenced many linguists between World War I and WWII. In the United
States, for instance, Leonard Bloomfield developed his own version of structural linguistics, as
did Louis Hjelmslev in Denmark and Alf Sommerfelt in Norway. In France Antoine Meillet and
Émile Benveniste would continue Saussure's program. Most importantly, however, members of
the Prague School of linguistics such as Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy conducted
research that would be greatly influential.
The clearest and most important example of Prague School structuralism lies in phonemics.
Rather than simply compiling a list of which sounds occur in a language, the Prague School
sought to examine how they were related. They determined that the inventory of sounds in a
language could be analyzed in terms of a series of contrasts. Thus in English the sounds /p/
and /b/ represent distinct phonemes because there are cases (minimal pairs) where the contrast
between the two is the only difference between two distinct words (e.g. 'pat' and 'bat'). Analyzing
sounds in terms of contrastive features also opens up comparative scope — it makes clear, for
instance, that the difficulty Japanese speakers have differentiating /r/ and /l/ in English is because
these sounds are not contrastive in Japanese. While this approach is now standard in linguistics,
it was revolutionary at the time. Phonology would become the paradigmatic basis for
structuralism in a number of different fields.

[edit] Structuralism in anthropology and sociology

Main articles: structural anthropology and structural functionalism

According to structural theory in anthropology and social anthropology, meaning is produced

and reproduced within a culture through various practices, phenomena and activities which serve
as systems of signification. A structuralist studies activities as diverse as food preparation and
serving rituals, religious rites, games, literary and non-literary texts, and other forms of
entertainment to discover the deep structures by which meaning is produced and reproduced
within a culture. For example, an early and prominent practitioner of structuralism,
anthropologist and ethnographer Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s, analyzed cultural phenomena
including mythology, kinship (the Alliance theory and the incest taboo), and food preparation
(see also structural anthropology). In addition to these studies, he produced more linguistically-
focused writings where he applied Saussure's distinction between langue and parole in his search
for the fundamental mental structures of the human mind, arguing that the structures that form
the "deep grammar" of society originate in the mind and operate in us unconsciously. Levi-
Strauss was inspired by information theory[citation needed] and mathematics[citation needed].
Another concept was borrowed from the Prague school of linguistics, where Roman Jakobson
and others analysed sounds based on the presence or absence of certain features (such as
voiceless vs. voiced). Levi-Strauss included this in his conceptualization of the universal
structures of the mind, which he held to operate based on pairs of binary oppositions such as hot-
cold, male-female, culture-nature, cooked-raw, or marriageable vs. tabooed women. A third
influence came from Marcel Mauss, who had written on gift exchange systems. Based on Mauss,
for instance, Lévi-Strauss argued that kinship systems are based on the exchange of women
between groups (a position known as 'alliance theory') as opposed to the 'descent' based theory
described by Edward Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes.
While replacing Marcel Mauss at his Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes chair, Lévi-Strauss'
writing became widely popular in the 1960s and 1970s and gave rise to the term "structuralism"
itself. In Britain authors such as Rodney Needham and Edmund Leach were highly influenced by
structuralism. Authors such as Maurice Godelier and Emmanuel Terray combined Marxism with
structural anthropology in France. In the United States, authors such as Marshall Sahlins and
James Boon built on structuralism to provide their own analysis of human society. Structural
anthropology fell out of favour in the early 1980s for a number of reasons. D'Andrade (1995)
suggests that structuralism in anthropology was eventually abandoned because it made
unverifiable assumptions about the universal structures of the human mind. Authors such as Eric
Wolf argued that political economy and colonialism should be more at the forefront of
anthropology. More generally, criticisms of structuralism by Pierre Bourdieu led to a concern
with how cultural and social structures were changed by human agency and practice, a trend
which Sherry Ortner has referred to as 'practice theory'.
Some anthropological theorists, however, while finding considerable fault with Lévi-Strauss's
version of structuralism, did not turn away from a fundamental structural basis for human
culture. The Biogenetic Structuralism group for instance argued that some kind of structural
foundation for culture must exist because all humans inherit the same system of brain structures.
They proposed a kind of Neuroanthropology which would lay the foundations for a more
complete scientific account of cultural similarity and variation by requiring an integration of
cultural anthropology and neuroscience--a program also embraced by such theorists as Victor
Turner.

[edit] Structuralism in literary theory and literary criticism

Main article: Semiotic literary criticism

In literary theory, structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examining

the underlying unchanging structure, which is based on the linguistic sign system of Ferdinand
de Saussure. The structuralists claim that there must be a structure in every text, which explains
why it is easier for experienced readers than for non-experienced readers to interpret a text.
Hence, they say that everything that is written seems to be governed by specific rules, a
"grammar of literature"[4], that one learns in educational institutions and that are to be unmasked.
A potential problem of structuralist interpretation is that it can be highly reductive, as scholar
Catherine Belsey puts it, "the structuralist danger of collapsing all difference"[5]. An example of
such a reading might be if a student concludes the authors of West Side Story did not write
anything "really" new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and
Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a "formula" with a symbolic operator between
them would be "Boy + Girl") despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other
("Boy's Group - Girl's Group" or "Opposing forces") and conflict is resolved by their death.
Structuralist readings best focus on how the structures of the single text resolve inherent
narrative tensions. If a structuralist reading focuses on multiple texts, there must be some way in
which those texts unify themselves into a coherent system. The versatility of structuralism is
such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families
("Boy's Family + Girl's Family") that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact
that the children hate each other ("Boy - Girl") and then the children commit suicide to escape
the arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story's structure is an 'inversion' of the
first story's structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties
involved have been reversed.
Structuralistic literary criticism argues that the "novelty value of a literary text" can lie only in
new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that
structure is expressed. One branch of literary structuralism, like Freudianism, Marxism, and
transformational grammar, posits both a deep and a surface structure. In Freudianism and
Marxism the deep structure is a story, in Freud's case the battle, ultimately, between the life and
death instincts, and in Marx, the conflicts between classes that are rooted in the economic "base."
Literary structuralism often follows the lead of Vladimir Propp and Claude Levi-Strauss in
seeking out basic deep elements in stories, myths, and more recently, anecdotes, which are
combined in various ways to produce the many versions of the ur-story or ur-myth. As in Freud
and Marx, but in contrast to transformational grammar, these basic elements are meaning-
bearing.
There is considerable similarity between structural literary theory and Northrop Frye's archetypal
criticism, which is also indebted to the anthropological study of myths. Some critics have also
tried to apply the theory to individual works, but the effort to find unique structures in individual
literary works runs counter to the structuralist program and has an affinity with New Criticism.
The other branch of literary structuralism is semiotics, and it is based on the work of Ferdinand
de Saussure.

[edit] Structuralism after World War II

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, existentialism like that propounded by Jean-Paul Sartre was
the dominant mood. Structuralism surged to prominence in France after WWII and particularly
in the 1960s. The initial popularity of structuralism in France led it to spread across the globe.
The social sciences were particularly influenced.
Structuralism rejected the concept of human freedom and choice and focused instead on the way
that human behavior is determined by various structures. The most important initial work on this
score was Claude Lévi-Strauss's 1949 volume Elementary Structures of Kinship. Lévi-Strauss
had known Jakobson during their time together in New York during WWII and was influenced
by both Jakobson's structuralism as well as the American anthropological tradition. In
Elementary Structures he examined kinship systems from a structural point of view and
demonstrated how apparently different social organizations were in fact different permutations of
a few basic kinship structures. In the late 1950s he published Structural Anthropology, a
collection of essays outlining his program for structuralism.
By the early 1960s structuralism as a movement was coming into its own and some believed that
it offered a single unified approach to human life that would embrace all disciplines. Roland
Barthes and Jacques Derrida focused on how structuralism could be applied to literature.
Blending Freud and De Saussure, the French (post)structuralist Jacques Lacan applied
structuralism to psychoanalysis and, in a different way, Jean Piaget applied structuralism to the
study of psychology. But Jean Piaget, who would better define himself as constructivist,
considers structuralism as "a method and not a doctrine" because for him "there exists no
structure without a construction, abstract or genetic"[6]
Michel Foucault's book The Order of Things examined the history of science to study how
structures of epistemology, or episteme, shaped the way in which people imagined knowledge
and knowing (though Foucault would later explicitly deny affiliation with the structuralist
movement).
In much the same way, American historian of science Thomas Kuhn addressed the structural
formations of science in his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - its title alone
evincing a stringent structuralist approach. Though less concerned with "episteme," Kuhn
nonetheless remarked at how coteries of scientists operated under and applied a standard praxis
of 'normal science,' deviating from a standard 'paradigm' only in instances of irreconcilable
anomalies that question a significant body of their work.
Blending Marx and structuralism another French theorist Louis Althusser introduced his own
brand of structural social analysis, giving rise to "structural Marxism". Other authors in France
and abroad have since extended structural analysis to practically every discipline.
The definition of 'structuralism' also shifted as a result of its popularity. As its popularity as a
movement waxed and waned, some authors considered themselves 'structuralists' only to later
eschew the label.
The term has slightly different meanings in French and English. In the US, for instance, Derrida
is considered the paradigm of post-structuralism while in France he is labeled a structuralist.[citation
needed]
Finally, some authors wrote in several different styles. Barthes, for instance, wrote some
books which are clearly structuralist and others which clearly are not.

[edit] Reactions to structuralism

Today structuralism is less popular than approaches such as post-structuralism and
deconstruction. There are many reasons for this. Structuralism has often been criticized for being
ahistorical and for favoring deterministic structural forces over the ability of individual people to
act. As the political turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s (and particularly the student uprisings of
May 1968) began affecting academia, issues of power and political struggle moved to the center
of people's attention. The ethnologist Robert Jaulin defined another ethnological method which
clearly pitted itself against structuralism.
In the 1980s, deconstruction and its emphasis on the fundamental ambiguity of language--rather
than its crystalline logical structure--became popular. By the end of the century structuralism was
seen as a historically important school of thought, but it was the movements it spawned, rather
than structuralism itself, which commanded attention.

[edit] Notes
a b
1. ^ John Sturrock, Structuralism and Since, Introduction.
2. ^ Assiter, A 1984, 'Althusser and structuralism', The British journal of
sociology, vol. 35, no. 2, Blackwell Publishing, pp.272-296.
3. ^ Barry, P 2002, 'Structuralism', Beginning theory: an introduction to literary
and cultural theory, Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. 39-60.
4. ^ Selden, Raman / Widdowson, Peter / Brooker, Peter: A Reader's Guide to
Contemporary Literary Theory Fifth Edition. Harlow: 2005. Page 76
5. ^ Belsey, Catherine. "Literature, History, Politics." Literature and History 9
(1983): 17-27.
6. ^ Jean Piaget, Le structuralisme, ed. PUF, 1968

[edit] See also